 is the most extensive public art project ever installed in Hong Kong with support from visionary landlords and welcomed by the 

. The work was originally conceived in the year when, for the first time, over half of the planet’s human population were recorded as living in cities. Thirty-one sculptures looking out into space will be mounted at both street level and on the tops of building across Hong Kong’s Central and Western districts, questioning how the built world relates to an inherited earth.

‘Isolated against the sky in Hong Kong Island Central District where densely spaced and densely occupied towers rise up between mountains and sea, these still and silent bodies look out into space, asking where the human project fits in the scheme of things. This installation questions how the built world relates to an inherited earth, and was originally conceived in the year in which it was first reported that half the planet’s human population were living in cities.

The sculptures are indexical copies of my body; they indicate a particular time of a particular body: a subjective place that could be anybody’s but indicates a human space within space at large. The title originates from cosmological physics and refers to the boundary of the observable universe. Because the universe is expanding, there are objects that will never be visible, as their light will never reach us. The works remind us of our relationship with deep space and they gaze out towards the horizon: the meeting between sky and earth invisible to us on the street. The horizon is our perceptual limit, our final skin. There is always the question that beyond those figures that you can actually see, how many more are out of sight, quietly witnessing events beyond our view?

 engages the desire to look up and look again at familiar places in a new way. Within the condensed environment of Hong Kong, the tension between the palpable, perceivable and imaginable is heightened. My intention is to get the sculptures as visible as possible against the sky, allowing each to be seen as a body against light and space, entering in and out of visibility to those walking the streets. The installation should have no defining boundary. This is an acupuncture of the city that connects it to space at large. In the process of seeking and finding (or seeking and perhaps not finding), perhaps we can re-assess our own position in the world.’

, 2007, 27 fibreglass and 4 cast iron figures, 189 × 53 × 29 cm (each element). Photograph by Oak Taylor-Smith.

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